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"Foreign occupation"
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Rage Against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars
During the nineteenth century, states routinely defeated insurgent foes. Over the twentieth century, however, this pattern reversed itself, with states increasingly less likely to defeat insurgents or avoid meeting at least some of their demands. What accounts for this pattern of outcomes in counterinsurgency (COIN) wars? We argue that increasing mechanization within state militaries after World War I is primarily responsible for this shift. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, modern militaries possess force structures that inhibit information collection among local populations. This not only complicates the process of sifting insurgents from noncombatants but increases the difficulty of selectively applying rewards and punishment among the fence-sitting population. Modern militaries may therefore inadvertently fuel, rather than deter, insurgencies. We test this argument with a new data set of 286 insurgencies (1800–2005) and a paired comparison of two U.S. Army divisions in Iraq (2003–2004). We find that higher levels of mechanization, along with external support for insurgents and the counterinsurgent's status as an occupier, are associated with an increased probability of state defeat. By contrast, we find only partial support for conventional power- and regime-based explanations, and no support for the view that rough terrain favors insurgent success.
Journal Article
Inglorious empire : what the British did to India
\"In the eighteenth century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor [refutes] this position, [believing that] every supposed imperial 'gift'--from the railways to the rule of law--was designed in Britain's interests alone\"--Back cover.
Book
The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation
This densely argued essay offers an original approach to the study of Israel-Palestine through the lens of colonial studies. The author’s argument rests, inter alia, on the distinction between colonialism, which succeeds by keeping colonizer and colonized separate, and settler colonialism, where ultimate success is achieved when the settlers are “indigenized” and cease to be seen as settlers. Referring to the pre-1948 and post-1967 contexts, the author shows how and why Israel, itself a successful settler colonial project emerging from the British mandate, has failed to create a successful settler project in the occupied territories; indeed, and paradoxically, the occupation’s very success (in terms of unassailable control) renders the project’s success (in terms of settler integration/indigenization) impossible. Also addressed are the consequences of occupation, particularly what the author calls Israel’s “recolonization,” and the implications of the approach outlined for the Israel-Palestine conflict and its resolution.
Journal Article
Spacing Palestine through the home
This paper explores connections that can be made between houses, homes and violence in Palestine, and representational consequences of making such connections. Drawing on ethnographic field research in Birzeit, I put recent work on critical geographies of home into conversation with geographies and geopolitics of Palestine. I criticise the tendency to represent Palestinian geographies almost entirely through the lens of the Israeli Occupation. While such studies have a great deal of value both academically and politically, this paper augments such work by developing a different focus and a different representational approach. I use detailed ethnographic vignettes and interviews to engage with the domestic practices that make particular Birzeiti homes. These intimate domestic encounters underpin my argument that there is a need for more work that apprehends Palestinian geographies as complexities that bear a relation to, but are not fully determined by, the Israeli Occupation.
Journal Article
Do Foreign Occupations Cause Suicide Attacks?
The phenomenon of suicide attacks has dramatically expanded over the last twenty years, rising from no events in 1980 to a total of 1,398 events by 2008. A prominent theory has argued that suicide attacks are a coercive strategy aimed at ending foreign military occupation by democracies. Yet these conclusions are based on a research design that is affected by selection bias and that fails to distinguish foreign occupations from cases of groups seeking independence or autonomy, which we term domestic occupations. Analyzing an original data set that distinguishes the different types of occupation, we find that only foreign occupations have a strong and consistent effect on the incidence of suicide attacks. The reason, we argue, is that suicide attacks only become cost effective when targets are both hardened and accessible, a strategic environment that is more common to civil wars and foreign occupations than to domestic occupations.
Journal Article
International impact of colonial rule in Korea, 1910-1945
\"What can today's world learn from the echoes of Korea's colonial experience?\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
GETTING BY THE OCCUPATION: How Violence Became Normal during the Second Palestinian Intifada
The second Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation, which began in September 2000, saw Palestinian areas repeatedly invaded and shelled by Israeli forces. A long history of war and targeted cities is told along the thoroughfares of Palestinian towns; memories of past battles and defeats inscribed in street signs recall massacres in places like Tel Al‐Za'atar and Deir Yasin. But recent events were more important than any official marker and formed the most relevant base by which Palestinians organized their lives. Commemorative cultural production and basic acts of physically getting around that became central to the spatial and social practices by which reorientation and adaptation to violence occurred in the occupied Palestinian territories. This article analyzes the spaciotemporal, embodied, and symbolic aspects of the experience of violence, and the political significance of cultural practices whereby violence is routinized. Such an approach provides a lens onto the power of violence in Israel's colonial project in the occupied territories that neither necessitates an assumption that violence is all determining of Palestinian experience, nor a championing of every act of Palestinian survival as heroic resistance. Memorialization that occurs in storytelling, in visual culture, in the naming of places and moving through spaces is one way in which this happens. The concept of “getting by” captures the many spatial and commemorative forms by which Palestinians manage everyday survival. The kind of agency that is entailed in practices whereby people manage, get by, adapt, and the social significance of getting used to it may be somewhat nebulous and unobtrusive as it develops in the shadow of spectacular battles and bloodshed. I demonstrate that this routinization of violence in and of itself, the fact of getting by, just existing in an everyday way, is socially and politically significant in Palestine.
Journal Article